'Charlotte Brontë' reveals the reality behind her characters

"Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart" by Claire Harman is a biography of the author of "Jane Eyre" and other classics, which corrects the record of Charlotte Bronte as an edifying Victorian martyr.

"Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart" by Claire Harman is a biography of the author of "Jane Eyre" and other classics, which corrects the record of Charlotte Bronte as an edifying Victorian martyr.

(National Portrait Gallery London / Getty-AFP)

Katherine A. Powers

April 21 marks the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth and is the occasion for the publication of another biography of a writer who has captured readers' imagination quite as much as her most famous creations — and for good reason.

Brontë's life was filled with enough domestic drama, passion, romantic suffering and melancholy circumstance for any fictional character. Indeed, Brontë's first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, created a version that was essentially fiction, glossing over her subject's turbulent sexual yearning to present an edifying Victorian martyr, a woman surrounded by madness and death. Since then, there have been countless other versions, Freudian, Marxist, paternalistic and feminist among them.

And now here is Claire Harman's "Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart," a well-researched, wonderfully lucid, pleasingly written treatment of a most extraordinary woman.

Harman's biography does not, unsurprisingly, alter the well-known outlines of Charlotte Brontë's life. She was the third of the six children born to a clergyman, Patrick Brontë, and his wife, Maria, who died when Charlotte was 5. That death was followed less than four years later by those of her two elder sisters, leaving Charlotte, her brother, Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne living with their self-absorbed father in the gloom and chill of Haworth parsonage next to a graveyard and the "brown and purple sweeps" of the Yorkshire moors. Here the Brontë siblings, all indefatigable scribblers, created a fantastical literary universe which, in the sisters' case, evolved into published works under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Meanwhile their brother, "perfectly cast in the part of the undiscovered genius — as long as the discovery didn't take too long," became addicted to opium and drink, turning, alternately, to rampaging brute and pathetic invalid. With the publication of "Jane Eyre," Charlotte's fame, as Currer Bell, was secured, but tragedy followed as her sisters and brother died within little more than eight months of each other. Charlotte gradually emerged from anonymity, published "Shirley" and "Villette," married, but died 11 months later, a few months into a pregnancy.

What makes this biography such a rewarding work is the poise and easy confidence with which Harman summons character and creative imagination, not only Charlotte's, but her sisters' too, showing, most crucially, how Charlotte's reading of their work unleashed a bold, hitherto absent "emotional force" in her own writing. Harmon follows the storms of passion that tore through the dreary parsonage at Haworth: Charlotte's fierce literary ambition; her deep-rooted attachment to Anne and Emily; her devastating grief at their deaths; her growing disgust with her dissipated, wastrel brother; her thralldom to her selfish, self-regarding father; and her anguished, humiliating passion for the Belgian schoolmaster, Constantin Heger, which found literary form in "The Professor," and, more piercingly and successfully, in "Villette."

Harman moves Charlotte's life and her writing along together with assurance, demonstrating the influence of one upon the other without a lot of heavy lifting. She also shows what a revolutionary writer Charlotte actually was in "Jane Eyre," with its first-person narrator and unholy passion, and, even more, in "Villette," which, "forged from such personal and painful material, reached psychological depths never attempted in fiction before and became, unwittingly, a landmark in the depiction of states of mind and self-perception, a thoroughly, peculiarly and disturbingly Modernist novel."

Harman is sympathetic to Charlotte — who is not? — but, socially awkward, intolerant, and frankly quite crabby, she was, without doubt, a difficult person. Harman, for instance, brings an astute, somewhat dismayed eye to Charlotte's later, increasingly demanding infatuation for Charles Smith, one of her publishers, a young man who liked her as a friend, but who became distant — possibly appalled — once he picked up on her sentiments. Still, Harman shows how this disappointment led to Charlotte's accepting the marriage proposal of her father's curate, the devoted Arthur Bell Nicholls (an offer which her jealous, self-serving father referred to as "dangerous designs")and notes how Charlotte's feelings for Nicholls evolved into real love.

Harman's tart, understated wit and gift for quotation shine throughout, as, for instance, the Rev. Patrick Brontë's version of a love poem: "But hark, fair maid! Whate'er they say/ You're but a breathing mass of clay/ Fast ripening for the grave." She is also generous with incident and telling details, among them Charlotte's unsuccessful attempt at improving her appearance with a hairpiece ("a wad of brown merino wool") and her high-handedness with an unmarried friend once she herself had become a wife. Who can say at this point which is the best biography of Charlotte Brontë, but Harman's is among them and perhaps the most engaging of all.

Katherine A. Powers received the 2013 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of "Suitable Accommodations: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963."